Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus, with Reggie Williams

For Christians, morality is often set by our interpretation of Jesus. In this episode, Reggie Williams reflects on the moral urgency of resistance in the face of rising nationalisms and systemic racial injustice that persists.

Reggie Williams is associate professor of black theology at Saint Louis University, and author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. Exploring the transformative and fraught legacy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he draws from Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black Christian faith in Harlem. He traces both the revolutionary promise and the colonial limits of Bonhoeffer’s thought—ultimately offering a compelling call to face the challenge of colonialism embedded in Christian theological frameworks, and unmask and dismantle the assumptions of white Western dominance within theology.

Episode Highlights

• “Even the most sincere and most brilliant, and even pious Christian, if we’re not paying attention to the way in which we are formed, repeats the problems that he’s trying to address in society.”
• “Our interpretation of Jesus shapes our morality as Christians.”
• “Hitler and Dietrich both understood their crisis as christological—just with radically different ends.”
• “Christ is actually present in the world in space and time—but for Bonhoeffer, that was the West. That’s a problem.”
• “The arbiter of culture owes it to the rest of the world not to be cruel. But what if the whole project needs to be undone?”
• “Access for black people has always meant white loss in the white imagination. That’s the virus in the body politic.”

Helpful Links and Resources

• Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus by Reggie Williams
• Ethics by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• Just Peacemaking by Glen Stassen

About Reggie L. Williams

Reggie L. Williams is associate professor of black theology at Saint Louis University. A scholar of Christian social ethics, he focuses on race, religion, and justice, with a particular interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theological development during his time in Harlem. Williams is the author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus and a leading voice on the intersections of colonialism, theology, and ethics.

Show Notes

• Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus reframes theological ethics through the lens of Harlem’s Black Church experience
• Reggie Williams explores how racialized interpretations of Jesus shape Christian morality
• Glen Stassen’s just peacemaking framework helped form Williams’s commitment to justice-oriented ethics
• Bonhoeffer’s exposure to black theology in Harlem was transformative—but its disruption didn’t last
• “The church must say something about those targeted by harmful political structures.”
• Bonhoeffer saw racism as a theological issue after Harlem, but still defaulted to Western Christology
• “Christ is located in the real world—but for Bonhoeffer, that meant colonial Europe and America”
• Williams critiques Bonhoeffer’s failure to see Christ outside the imperial West
• “Behold the man”—Bonhoeffer’s formulation still echoes a European epistemology of the human
• The human as we know it is a European philosophical construct rooted in colonial domination
• Bonhoeffer’s Ethics critiques Nazism but still centres the West as the space of Christ’s incarnation
• “The unified West was his answer to fascism—but it still excluded the harmed and colonized.”
• Even as a resister, Bonhoeffer operated within metaphysical frames of white supremacy
• “A reformed imperial Christianity is still imperial—we need a theological break, not a revision.”
• Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship reflected troubling views on slavery—he changed over time
• “From 1937 to 1939 he moves from withdrawal to coup attempt—his ethics evolved.”
• Reggie Williams argues the theological academy still operates under Bonhoeffer’s colonial presumptions
• “White Christian nationalism is a sacred project—whiteness floats above history as God’s proxy”
• Racial hierarchy was created to justify economic domination, not the other way around
• “Black access is always imagined as white loss in the American imagination”
• The DEI backlash reflects a long pattern of retrenchment following black progress
• “How we treat bodies is how we treat the planet—domination replaces communion”
• Bonhoeffer’s flaws do not erase his significance—they remind us of the need for grace and growth
• “He’s frozen in time at thirty-nine—we don’t know what he would’ve come to see had he lived.”
• Mark Labberton calls the current moment a five-alarm fire requiring voices like Williams’s
• “We are at the precipice of the future all over again—the old crisis is still with us.”
• The church’s complicity in empire must be confronted to recover the radical gospel of Jesus
• The moral imagination of the church must be unshackled from whiteness, ownership, and dominance

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.